Pages

10 October 2015

Good friends are good

Or should that be "mates" given the nautical nature of part of this post?

Work has been well and truly claiming its pound of flesh over the past couple of weeks as departmental analysis reports, performance management, and budget cuts have had me scurrying around much more than usual. Not even a sniff of eight hours rest each day, never mind eight hours of leisure!

As an aside, workers of the world, we should still be fighting for this!

Oh, right, back to the gaming bit of the blog post. A good friend came over with his family today (the kids had a blast, charging around with wooden swords and collecting conkers in the woods) and brought me a present. Last year, when I was still hoping to get to BOYL '15 and take part in the big naval game, I'd mentioned to him that I was after a medieval cog (that's a ship, by the way, not a piece of clockwork) so, when he'd seen a mostly-completed-but-not-painted zvezda kit, he'd snapped it up for me. Excellent!

Hopefully mine will wind up looking like this when I'm done.

It also perked me up after that shoddy old week at work, but not before I'd tried to do it myself by splurging on cut-price skeletons from Black Tree Design. They look suitably old-school online and I hope they'll fit in nicely as villains in both Knights' Quest adventures (ooh, spoilers!) and in Warhammer 3rd (spell-raised skellies are always good for a giggle if nothing else), or any other fantasy game for that matter!

There are some repeats in the pack of eighteen, so I'll be doing some weapon-swaps to increase variety

They're still on sale at the time of typing and, if you're worried you've missed out - don't! They'll be on sale again soon...

In other gaming news, this month may end up being OSRtober, rather than ORCtober. I've been asked by a nice bunch of half a dozen 6th formers to run an afterschool gaming club and they're particularly keen on trying a bit of D&D, so I'm dusting off my copy of Swords & Wizardry (an OSR retro-clone), or possibly my copy of Basic/Expert D&D and will run my first game since I was years younger than they are now. I'm planning on going grid/map/miniature free for full old-school feel and setting it in my kingdom of Averaigne, so it'll be interesting at least!

Right, I'm off to read an article for new DMs about the marvellously pretentiously titled "theatre of the mind" which, as far as I can tell, means DMing so that your players know what's going on...

About Me

The escapist hobby of my teenage years has resurfaced as a way for my adult self to relax and be creative after all the important parts of my day have been addressed. Nostalgia for the simplicity of my youth is undoubtedly a part of it!